To which Paul Lane replied that he ‘aimed t’ stay just the same.’ Yes, he had read that sign at Antelope Creek, and in his opinion the man who put it there had a lot of gall.
‘There’s a hell of a lot of land on this side of that road,’ he told Morgan. ‘Fact of the matter is, yuh could go plumb around the world on it, and I don’t see how any one man has the gall to claim all of it.’
‘Then you aim to try and stay here, eh?’ queried Morgan.
‘I aim to stay here,’ corrected Lane. ‘And yuh might pass the word around that I’m settled.’
‘We don’t pass our troubles along,’ said Morgan. ‘I’ll give yuh three days to move on.’
‘And then what?’
‘Wait and see.’
Lane waited. He knew there was no use appealing to the law until something happened to injure him in some way; and he also knew that the nester would get little consideration in a Mesa City courtroom.
Peter Morgan’s first move, a petty one, was to make a night raid on the nester’s stable and silently remove all of his horses; herding them far back on the headwaters of Black Horse River, twenty miles away.
Two days later the horses were all back in Lane’s corral, and Dell Bowen, foreman of the 6X6, found two of the 6X6 saddle horses in the hills, sore-footed, sore-backed; attesting to the fact that Lane and his gangling son had used them to round up their stock.